Crossword Express 7.4d

Years ago, when I prepared for the Scholastic Achievement Test (SAT), my
main focus was the English portion of the test, as English was not my
first language. I got the idea of playing crossword puzzles as a fun way
to reinforce my study. At one point, I wanted to make them myself, and
got nowhere fast. It was mid-1980s, and the personal computer revolution
was well under way, but I was just a high school kid and didn’t own a
computer. I suppose master makers usually have all the words in their
heads, but for others the task of making crossword puzzles is best
relegated to computers.

Fast forward to 2007. Through some free local daily newspapers, I had a
renewed interest in doing crossword puzzles. Naturally, I wanted to make
my own puzzles now that I own a Mac. I wanted to make puzzles just like
those I played in the papers, in which the shortest word length is
three, the lattice design is symmetrical, and all the words have clues.
There are Web tools, such as the Puzzlemaker,
but the puzzles made via the Web tools do not meet my expectations. I
came across a few Mac programs and settled with Crossword Express (CWE)
OS X from AUS-PC-SOFT.

Installation is a matter of moving the uncompressed files, in their own
folder, to wherever you normally keep applications. CWE has different
Mac versions, going way back to support the Motorola 68K chip. There’s a
PowerPC version for OS 9 users and an OS X variant for all OS X
versions. No Universal version of CWE is planned at this time. This
review was made on a PowerBook G4 running Mac OS X 10.4.

Featurewise, CWE also has different versions. With the $35 Lite version,
you can make crossword puzzles and word search puzzles up to a size of
47x47. You also have access to a set of Java applets on the CrausWords
Web site to Web-enable the puzzles you made. The Lite license allows you
to keep CWE on only one computer at any one time. On the other hand, the
$140 Pro version lets you have CWE installed on unlimited number of
computers at a physical location. With CWE Pro, you can also make many
other types of puzzles, such as sudoku, kakuro, and acrostics. Likewise,
with the Java applets available on the CrausWords Web site you can
publish all such puzzles on the Web. With both versions, you are
entitled to all future upgrades of CWE for free.

Registration is done via PayPal. In my case, I got the necessary info to
unlock the demo version of CWE in five hours. I think the people who
want to make crossword puzzles are patient, so a wait of a few hours is
not a long time.

Crossword Express works mostly from the Control Panel.

The master puzzlemaker can dive straight for the Manual Construction
button. Pick an existing lattice and off the master would go. Should he
need it, the Suggestion button is readily available in the window. One
click on it and he gets a list of words that fit into the current
location. If you are an amateur or wannabe maker like me, it’s best to
head for the Make Standard Puzzles button. Again, you would select a
lattice from the many built-in. Enter a few words and clues, and when
stuck simply click the Start Make button. CWE will fly into action, and it
draws from the selected dictionary to best fill out the rest of the
puzzle for you.

Relying on CWE’s many built-in dictionaries can churn out puzzles
quickly, but the puzzles thus made are not really yours. A great portion
of the puzzle should be words and clues you made up. This is when you
need to click the Dictionary Maintenance. The built-in
dictionaries—English, French, German, Spanish-English, etc,—are yours to
edit, but the fun begins when you create your own. The idea is that you
build your own dictionaries, with your own words and definitions. For
example, I am trying to make an ATPM-themed dictionary, using names of
software reviewed in ATPM and staff members’ names. One of the words is
“Dudar,” and its clue is “Dude who does 3D.”

Be patient and enter many words, say 200 or more, then re-visit Make
Standard Puzzles. Even with what you think is a big dictionary, it may
not be enough for the selected lattice and you may need to choose a
smaller lattice or go back to the dictionary and enter more words. The
work of building a dictionary is tedious, but it is a controlled tedium
you deal with. I much prefer building a dictionary of a few hundred
words then letting CWE use brute force to squeeze my word list into the
puzzle. It is much less frustrating than doing the work manually. Making
a good crossword puzzle takes time and patience. If you have neither,
you are better off playing shoot-em-up games or some gem-switching game.

The creator of CWE correctly surmises that lots of times one custom
dictionary just doesn’t cut it. With Make Standard Puzzle, you can use a
second dictionary to fill the puzzle, but the second dictionary can be
used in only one direction. You can have the second dictionary
handle either all the DOWN words or all the ACROSS words, but not both.
To use a dictionary to fill in any gaps, DOWN or ACROSS, you need to
resort to Construct Special Interest Puzzles. You build Special Interest
dictionaries the same way as standard ones, except that you name them
with a leading dollar sign ($), e.g $ATPM instead of ATPM. You can
choose up to four special interest dictionaries to have words drawn
from, then specify a back-fill dictionary. For example, I can have an
ATPM-themed dictionary called $ATPM, then a Mac-themed called $Mac,
and yet another one for general computing called $Computing. I would
then choose the English dictionary as back-fill. I still can manually
insert words and clues, perhaps those I want to show up in the puzzle.
Click Start Make, and CWE would quickly plow through the special
interest dictionaries and the English dictionary to find the best
possible match for the selected lattice.

Naturally you should be able to save and print the dictionaries and
puzzles that you create. CWE offers many printing options. You can print
everything—puzzle, clues, and even the previous puzzle’s solution, just
like your typical newspaper’s puzzle. You can also print just the puzzle
or just the solution. Dictionaries and puzzles can be saved only in
the same folder where CWE is stored. This arrangement can be a problem
if you share your Mac with someone who has restricted access. In such
cases, you may need to re-permission the CWE folder in order to allow the
restricted user the right to create his own dictionaries and puzzles.

In this day and age, most programs need some degree of interaction with
the Web. With CWE, there are a number of ways to publish the puzzles on
the Web, with varying level of user-friendliness. The simplest option is
to export puzzle and clues to the clipboard. A picture thus produced can
be easily shared, either in a blog or even in Flickr. The next option is to
export the puzzle and clues as an HTML file, but it takes a little more work.
Because CWE relies on having a GIF file called black.gif in the same
folder with the puzzle, the HTML version looks all wrong when black.gif
is not present, such as when you export the HTML file to somewhere other
than CWE’s folder. To put the HTML puzzle on the Web requires the upload
of the file black.gif. This requirement rules out the use of the HTML
version on blog sites like Blogger, where you have little control over
graphic elements unless you know some intermediate HTML coding. Surely
you can update the HTML code to fetch black.gif from somewhere else on
the Web, but again the average user wouldn’t know enough HTML
programming to carry out the extra work. See the two classroom puzzles
below to see the difference the presence or absence of black.gif makes.

Without black.gif

With black.gif

Lastly, for the serious coders, there’s the CWE Java applets. You are
supposed to upload to your Web server the file cweapplet.class, the
puzzles with the .cwe extension, and the sample HTML file(s) edited to refer
to your carefully crafted puzzles. While the applets are very powerful
and allow for plenty of customization of the puzzle, making use of them
does require a degree of programming skill. One misspelled word and the
applet just won’t work, such is the way when you write codes by hand.

I believe neither the HTML export option nor the Java applet appeals to
the average CWE user. CWE would have a much better Web integration if it
included the option to publish to .Mac or iWeb. Better integration with
iLife would be beneficial, too. Supposedly there’s a way to include a
picture as the background for CWE puzzles, but I haven’t figured it out
yet (if only CWE could read iPhoto’s database and offer a simple way to
pull in the pictures…).

Based on the fact that CWE’s built-in dictionaries’ filenames are limited
to eight characters or fewer, I assume that CWE started out as a Windows
application. As a matter of fact, there is a version of CWE for Windows,
and the puzzle files created by either the Mac or Windows version can be
used on either platform. While I am grateful that the Mac platform has a
powerful crossword maker in CWE, using it is a very un-Mac-like
experience. On top of the lack of integration with .Mac and iLife, the
Control Panel looks very unattractive. The pictures have no shadows, are
not anti-aliased, and are flat.

With the ability to generate many kinds of crosswords, plus many other
kinds of puzzles with the Pro version, many built-in or downloadable
dictionaries, the use of customized dictionaries with built-in ones, CWE
is a very powerful puzzle maker. However, given its extra requirements
to publish puzzles on the Web and the lack of any Mac integration, I can
only give it a Good rating.

Reader Comments (1)

Thanks for your interesting commentary on CrossWord Express. Tell me, since this was written was several months ago, are you familiar with any successful users of Crossword Express in OS 10.5? The company reports that it has worked successfully, but this report was based on only a few users. So far, I'm still a bit timid about using it with my new Macintosh, yet my old one, the G4, is probably dying, so. . . .I have done a lot of work with the program on my G4, and was just about to try the updated version which facilitates the creation of the interactive puzzles, when half of my G4's memory died. It's up again, but I sure would prefer using it on my newer computers.

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